Peer-to-Peer Passé, Report Finds

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Peer-to-Peer Passé, Report Finds

Peer-to-peer file sharing has been the bogeyman of the internet, but a new report suggests it's destined become a fear of the past — replaced by cheap streaming video.

Rising from the ashes in the early 2000s of banned services like Napster, P2P soon became demonized as an imminent threat to software industry, Hollywood and the internet's backbone, prompting high-profile piracy trials, federal government hearings on traffic management and hand-wringing from ISPs who said torrents of illicit traffic would overwhelm the net.

But peer-to-peer file sharing is falling out of favor quickly, according a new report from Arbor Networks, a network-management firm used by more than 70 percent of the world's top ISPs. Falling out of favor so fast that the report declares that P2P is dead to ISPs.

"Globally P2P is declining and it is declining quickly," said Craig Labovitz, the chief scientist at Arbor Networks, in a preview of a paper of findings from data collected by Arbor Networks from its customers. Arbor's Atlas net monitoring tool analyzed traffic from 110 different ISPs, on nearly 3,000 routers, for a total of 264 exabytes of traffic. An exabyte is about a billion gigabytes. The company's insight into the net's core is probably only rivaled by the NSA, but they aren't ones to speak.

In fact, according to its sensors, peer-to-peer traffic still accounts for about 18 percent of all traffic. (That's by looking at packets – by protocol, P2P fell to less than one percent of traffic, but file sharing applications mask themselves in order to evade technical blocks.)

But compare that to 2007, when peer-to-peer peaked as high as 40 percent of net traffic, according to Labovitz.

In its place? Streaming video from sites like Hulu.com and YouTube, for one. And for downloads, sites like RapidShare and MegaUpload offer simple download hosting for files of all kinds, with premium and ad-supported accounts.

The flowering of alternative ways to watch shows and movies online, many of them ad-supported, has driven people away from the downloadable, but mostly illicit loot found through places like the Pirate Bay. For instance, you can watch whole seasons of television shows at Hulu, while Netflix members can stream a huge catalog of movies for free.

By contrast, P2P downloads arrive in random chunks, making it hard to know when a download will finish – which is when it's actually possible to start watching anything downloaded.

"P2P is a headache," Labovitz said.

By contrast, the web's market share of net traffic is up 10 percent from 2007, now comprising more than 50 percent of internet traffic. That's mostly driven by progressive http: downloads like YouTube uses, but Flash and Silverlight traffic is rising as well. (E-mail remains steady at about 1.4 percent of net traffic, despite the Wall Street Journal and Wired.com's attempt to kill it off.)

As for direct download sites? MegaUpload.com moved its hosting to Carpathia in 2007, which has since grown to handle some one percent of the net's traffic.

The change sheds another light on the long-running battle between ISPs, customers and federal regulators. Comcast is currently suing the FCC, arguing the government had no right to tell it in August 2008 to stop blocking peer-to-peer traffic, which the company said it had to do to save its network from congestion.